Labor markets are heavily distorted by immigration restrictions, producing wide and persistent wage differences for observably identical workers in developed and developing nations. Income for low skilled American workers is 16 times as high as Haitians in Haiti, about 7 times as high as Indians in India, and about 4 times as high as Mexicans in Mexico—all adjusted for purchasing power parity. Just by moving here immigrants can largely close that wage gap. 

There are very limited avenues for low skilled immigrants to immigrate legally, which raises an important question: if the economic benefits of immigrating are so high, why are there only 11 to 12 million unlawful immigrants here? 

Below are the two broad reasons: 

First, the benefits of immigrating are not as high as they seem. The probability of being employed in the destination country is a vital variable because unemployment does not confer any benefits on the immigrant. The skill level of prospective unlawful immigrants restricts job opportunities to certain occupations. If the sectors where low skilled immigrants work have high unemployment rates, as many do now, the chances of earning higher wages here is lower so the economic benefits of immigration are lower. Downward wage bargaining by immigrants is limited but unlawful immigrants do take a wage cut, all else being equal, of about 20 percent to compensate their employers for the legal risk of hiring them and other reasons. Growing economies in places like Mexico, China, and elsewhere might partially offset the benefits of immigrating by promising higher incomes in the near future. 

Second, the cost of unlawfully immigrating is very high. Opportunity costs, search costs (including language barriers), transportation costs, legal costs, the probability of dying en route, the probability of being sold into slavery, and the probability of not making it to the United States despite paying the smuggling fee are all high and increase risk. Immigration enforcement is very effective at deterring most would-be unlawful immigrants. High smuggling fees are a high up front cost. 

Immigration can be understood as an investment over a period of years. The length of time the immigrant spends here employed at higher wages increases the economic benefits of immigrating. The costs of immigrating, like paying for a smuggler, are fixed while there seems to be a low marginal cost for staying here to avoid immigration enforcement. The psychic costs could shift with time.

Here is an example:

Assume a Mexican immigrant wants to illegally move to the United States and work in construction. A marginal worker in the construction sector would have about an 86.2 percent chance of being employed at $40,000 with an effective tax rate of about 18 percent (including income and FICA taxes) and a 2.6 percent annual average wage increase. 

The cost of being smuggled in ($9,000 by boat, $4000 by land), buying documents to decrease the chances of detection, and opportunity cost from being out of the labor force is $11,000 assuming no psychic costs. After the first year, I assume that the out of pocket cost of living illegally was $1,000. 

Assuming a two percent discount rate, the net present value of moving to the United States for five years is $126,000. The net present value (NPV) of working in Mexico assuming a starting wage of $10,000 a year, 95 percent chance of being employed, a one percent wage growth, and a two percent discount rate is about $48,000. The wages are about 2.6 times as high assuming the immigrants successfully enters on his first attempt and immediately finds a job.

The uncertainty of working illegally in the United States, a higher smuggling price, and separation from one’s home dramatically increase costs. A relatively low annual cost of $11,000 a year in addition to smuggling fees of $9000 in the first year lowers the NPV to $77,340, just 61 percent greater than staying in Mexico. Psychic costs are higher for immigrants from countries that do not send many in the first place—like Yemen or the Central African Republic—because there is not a diaspora to fit in to. Unlawful immigrants are typically young, male, single, and without families—groups with the lowest psychic costs of immigrating. The opportunity cost of using capital to pay smugglers is also high, especially in poor countries. 

Immigration enforcement has a gargantuan deterrence effect—larger than any other factor. The vast majority of would-be unlawful immigrants are deterred by breaking immigration laws and the punishments—even if there is a small chance of being caught. A 10 percent increase in immigration enforcement hours along the border produced a 2.5 percent increase in smuggling prices—raising the cost of unlawfully immigrating. The size and scope of Border Patrol has increased substantially since 1980—virtually doubling in size since 2004. 

Here are the first year wage gains including the cost of smuggling from different countries of origin:

Source: 2011 American Community Survey, DHS, Havocscope. 

The smaller the wage gain to smuggling ratio is, the smaller the pure economic benefits of coming here are, assuming successful entry. If the Coast Guard was less effective or if Haitians could find a cheaper way to enter the United States unlawfully, many more would come. The pressure from Mexico is not nearly as great as many imagine. These numbers are only averages and probably understate the desirability of coming here but they explain why Indians and Chinese send so few unlawful immigrants despite the massive wage gains: immigration enforcement is very effective so it raises the price of smuggling. 

The costs of moving to the United States are very high and the benefits are lower than international wage differences make them seem. The benefits from moving to the United States for millions of people would be enormous for most Americans, the immigrants themselves, and those who stayed behind. Given those large wage differences, it is truly remarkable that there are so few unlawful immigrants in the United States.  

Ilya, Jim, and Roger have already ably covered many of the legal issues in yesterday’s major Fourth Amendment case, Maryland v. King, in which the Court narrowly approved DNA testing of arrestees. I’ve got an article in the Daily Beast this morning using Scalia’s dissent as my jumping-off point. Excerpt:

If there’s ever a time when Antonin Scalia really rises to the occasion, it’s when he serves as the Supreme Court’s liberal conscience.…

[A]long with the good [from DNA testing] comes a new potential, warned against by civil libertarians, for the authorities to use DNA access to track citizens through life. Who was at the closed-door meeting of political dissidents? Swab the discarded drinking cups for traces of saliva, match it to a universal database, and there you’ve got your list of attendees. Want to escape a bad start and begin life over in a different community? Good luck with that once your origins are an open book to officialdom.

In his dissent, Scalia warns of such a “genetic panopticon.” (The reference is to Jeremy Bentham’s idea of a prison laid out so that inmates could be watched at every moment.) And it’s closer than you may think. Already fingerprint requirements have multiplied, as the dissent points out, “from convicted criminals, to arrestees, to civil servants, to immigrants, to everyone with a driver’s license” in some states. DNA sample requirements are now following a similar path, starting reasonably enough with convicts before expanding, under laws passed by more than half the states as well as Maryland, to arrestees. (“Nearly one-third of Americans will be arrested for some offense by age 23.”) Soon will come wider circles. How long before you’ll be asked to give a DNA swab before you can board a plane, work as a lawn contractor, join the football team at your high school, or drive?

…

With the confidence that once characterized liberals of the Earl Warren–William Brennan school, Scalia says we can’t make catching more bad guys the be-all and end-all of criminal process:

“Solving unsolved crimes is a noble objective, but it occupies a lower place in the American pantheon of noble objectives than the protection of our people from suspicionless law-enforcement searches. The Fourth Amendment must prevail. … I doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.”

Incidentally, some of Scalia’s most scathing passages blast the majority for dwelling on objectives that Maryland might have accomplished by DNA testing, such as establishing a John Doe arrestee’s true identity, when in fact the state knew perfectly well who Alonzo King was when it collared him. Scalia nailed this rationale as merely pretextual, and just in case you doubted that, in a Washington Post interview just yesterday about the case, Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler frankly acknowledged that “the real reason for the law is solving crime.” Nothing there about a need to establish arrestees’ identities. The state’s own website explaining the law tells a similar story in its final sentence when it describes the 2009 change in the law.

The city of Red Wing, Minnesota, has a rental property inspection program—one that’s unfortunately not unusual—whereby landlords and tenants must routinely open their doors to government agents. These searches take place even if both the landlord and tenant believe it not to be necessary. The owner of the property even has to pay a fee for the unwanted search to receive a rental license! The city only sometimes makes initial requests for consent as a mere courtesy, because it proceeds with an administrative warrant in the event of a refusal—without a showing of probable cause to believe there’s a housing code violation or other problem. The inspection ordinance doesn’t even attempt to prevent the disclosure of information revealed during the search; the whole neighborhood may find out the contents of your medicine cabinet or choice of DVDs.

A group of landlords and tenants challenged the inspection program, arguing that several alternatives are available to meet what legitimate interests local governments have. Last September, Cato joined the Reason Foundation, Libertarian Law Council, Minnesota Free Market Institute at the Center of the American Experiment, and Electronic Frontier Foundation and filed an amicus brief urging the Minnesota Supreme Court to confirm that no Minnesotan should be subjected to an intrusive invasion of privacy when there has been no showing of some cognizable public health or safety issue within the home subject to inspection.

Last Friday, the Minnesota Supreme Court handed down its decision in McCaughtry v. Red Wing. Unfortunately, the Court decided to dodge the question of whether the government is required to obtain a warrant to inspect a residence without individualized probable cause under the U.S. or Minnesota Constitution.

The court’s reasoning is maddening: Red Wing’s ordinance allows judges to imagine individualized standards even when the city doesn’t present any individualized evidence when applying for a warrant. Moreover, the Court determined that the challenge was facial and thus the law would need to be unconstitutional in all of its potential applications in order to be struck down. Because some warrants could be constitutional, the Court ruled against the homeowners, and had absolutely nothing to say about the propriety of warrants issued without individualized probable cause. It did this even though the city has never sought such a warrant and has never said it has any interest in asking for one. The court was clear that its holding had absolutely nothing to say about whether a warrant issued without individualized probable cause would be unconstitutional.

So after nearly seven years of litigation, the plaintiffs are left where they started: these warrants may be unconstitutional, but the courts won’t say so. As a result, Minnesota residents remain subject to unconstitutional, over-broad, and intrusive searches of their homes, belongings, and lives.

There was a small silver lining in all this, a concurrence by Justice Paul Anderson, who said that he agreed with the court’s (unanimous) opinion but that the Minnesota Constitution does require individualized probable cause to obtain a warrant to enter someone’s residence. Although no other justices joined his opinion, this is the first statement by a state supreme court judge ever that narrows administrative warrants in the context of home inspections since the U.S. Supreme Court’s unhelpful and unclear Camara decision in 1967 started the trend toward such programs. (Telllingly, this concurrence was Justice Anderson’s last official act; he retired on Friday.) And that will be something to use on this issue going forward, whether in state courts or in federal courts, to eventually ask the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider Camara.

It’s usually a good thing when representatives of the Von Mises Institute and George Mason ends of the Austrian-economics spectrum agree with each other. But I can’t say I found it much to my liking when Joe Salerno and Pete Boettke agreed with each other concerning a CNBC interview I gave a week ago. For both held that, by declaring during that interview that “a case existed” for quantitative easing back in late 2008 and 2009, I seemed to forget my own case for free banking, joining ranks instead with apologists for monetary central planning.

Having defended myself against this particular accusation at the two sites where it came up (and in Joe’s follow-up post), I don’t intend to repeat my defense here, except to observe again that “a case existed” isn’t the same as “a slam-dunk case existed,” or something equivalent. I do, however, want to further engage the broader question concerning the pitfalls of the second best. For while I agree that the pitfalls are real, it hardly follows that what might be called the “intransigent first best” strategy, which is to say the strategy that treats second best prescriptions as slippery slopes to be rejected out of hand, is a more prudent alternative.

In considering whether it is, let’s not conflate the question at hand with questions concerning the merits of the Fed’s actual, recent undertakings. It seems to me relatively easy to find fault with those undertakings, including all three rounds of quantitative easing, even considered merely as second-best means for encouraging recovery, and I have for that reason not found it especially difficult to resist endorsing them. Instead, let’s suppose that it is the autumn of 2008, that the wholesale credit market has shut down (thanks in large part, admittedly, to the combined shenanigans of the Fed and the FDIC), and that aggregate demand has consequently begun its downward spiral. Let us also assume (again, for the sake of argument, but also because there is, I believe, plenty of evidence for it) that the collapse of demand, if allowed to go on, is bound to lead to falling sales and unemployment and other sorts of hardship, beyond the hardship made inevitable by the end of any unsustainable boom, in part because prices, and wage rates especially, can only be expected to adjust downward in response to fallen demand very gradually, if at all.* Let’s assume, further, that a free banking system would tend automatically to counter the tendency for demand to shrink, even despite a fixed monetary base, by allowing banks to operate on lower reserve ratios as the real demand for their deposits and notes increases. Finally, let’s suppose that we are fully aware of the mischief that discretionary central banks can do, and that we are all anxious to avoid making any statement that might be construed as approving of, much less further empowering, such institutions.

The relevant question then is: given the existing, centralized arrangement, what should the Fed do? Suppose the question is asked of you on a popular, live TV broadcast. How to respond prudently?

Will merely insisting on the first-best solution suffice? I don’t think so. In the present context that would mean saying something like, “The Fed should freeze the monetary base; but that isn’t all: Congress should then wind it up, while allowing other banks complete freedom to meet the public’s monetary needs, including the freedom to issue their own notes. This would also require doing away with deposit insurance and…” etc. Even supposing one could elaborate the argument in a few sound bites, or that one could go on for hours, the obvious problem remains that the steps required would take months to accomplish even if they could be instantly and universally agreed upon. The answer, therefore, begs the question, “What should the Fed do in the meantime?” We remain more or less where we began.

Nor, as some commentators (myself included) have noted elsewhere, is saying that the Fed should do “nothing” any better. So long as it exists the Fed is, of necessity, doing “something.” So “nothing” here must actually refer to some particular Fed policy. Most often (I gather) it means that the Fed should refrain from any further lending or open-market activities, or from otherwise expanding its balance sheet. It amounts, in other words, to recommending that the Fed maintain a constant monetary base. But is asking the Fed to maintain a constant base really indicating any more principled opposition to monetary central planning than one indicates by calling upon it to alter the base by some particular amount, or by whatever it takes to achieve some particular target? I don’t see why. Indeed, what some have wrongly taken to be the more principled of the two alternatives seems to me to be hardly more principled, though rather less prudent, for it calls, not for the avoidance of monetary central planning, but for the implementation of a monetary central plan that is likely, according to “our” theory, to be particularly lousy. Nor will it do to say that the “keep the base constant” alternative is superior in that it might be proposed, not just as a suggestion for the present, but as a hard-and-fast monetary rule, for the same might be said concerning the suggestion that the Fed expand the base only when doing so serves to keep spending stable.

The option of recommending that the central bank “do nothing” is, by the way, precisely the one Hayek chose to take back in the early 1930s when, despite having recognized in print the desirability of a constant “money stream,” and despite the fact that the money stream had dried up dramatically, he campaigned against expansionary monetary policy. As he explained many years later, with regrets, Hayek’s reason for departing from his own theoretical ideal had to do, not with any slippery-slope considerations, but with his belief that allowing the collapse of demand to go on could be just the thing needed to wrench the British labor market free from labor unions’ stranglehold.** Still it is difficult to see why the results would have been any different if, instead of having opposed monetary expansion because he hoped by doing so to help thaw a rigid labor market, he did so on other political-economy grounds. To say that Hayek’s strategy backfired is putting it mildly, for it was not labor unions but Hayek’s own theoretical legacy that suffered.

Must one, then, simply endorse monetary expansion, setting aside the first-best alternative altogether, while also neglecting those political-economy considerations as point to the inherent dangers of such a compromise? I don’t believe so. It seems to me that making a case for monetary expansion is not the same as making one for monetary central planning. It is a matter of choosing one’s language carefully. The prudent answer to the interviewer’s question may be something like this: “For better or for worse, we are forced to rely on the Fed to prevent such a collapse in demand, so the Fed should do what it is supposed to do. But the Fed is a deeply flawed system and continuing to rely on it is asking for trouble. There are better alternatives, and now is as good a time as any to start taking them seriously.”

Perhaps putting it so would still make one an apologist for central banking. In that case, my plea to Pete and Joe is, “guilty as charged.” But why settle for that, fellows, when you can throw the whole first-best book at me? After all, I also believe that, until better (free market) alternatives are in place, the USPS ought to deliver my first-class mail, and the FAA ought to keep the airplane I’m flying in from attempting to land on a busy runway.

____________________________________________

*I understand that the Salerno-Austrians will regard these assumptions as proof of my being a “Keynesian” and of my failing to understand Say’s Law. In answer I can only observe (1) that if I’m a Keynesian so, too, are Milton Friedman and Leland Yeager, among others; and (2) that my “problem” is not that I don’t understand Say’s Law; it is, rather, that, like most neoclassical (and some classical) economists, I happen to think that Say erred in assuming that people (or banks) never attempt to accumulate reserves or broader-money balances. I know not how anyone can look at recent statistics regarding banks’ (and other firms’) accumulations of cash reserves and still treat Say’s position as if it were irrefutable.
**See Lawrence H. White, The Clash of Economic Ideas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 95.

Roger Pilon and Jim Harper have already commented on the substance of Maryland v. King, but I wanted to highlight an aspect of the ruling that has raised some eyebrows, the lineup of justices. Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Alito, and Breyer. Meanwhile, Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan joined Justice Scalia’s hard-hitting dissent. Breyer with the “conservatives,” Scalia leading the “liberals”; what’s going on here?

Not that much, actually, in terms of jurisprudential surprises. As Orin Kerr points out, Justice Scalia has been on the defendants’ side in every non-unanimous Fourth Amendment case — King (DNA-swabbing of arrestees), Bailey (detention incident to search), Jardines (dog-sniffing a home), and McNeely (warrantless blood draw of DUI suspect) — while Justice Breyer has been on the prosecutors’ side in each of those cases. 

And the current term isn’t an anomaly. In 2009, for example, Scalia joined the majority in overturning the Court’s precedent that had allowed police to search a car upon arresting its driver in the case of Arizona v. Gant (which Scalia mentions in a law-nerd-witty footnote 6 of his King dissent). The same thing happened in another case that year, Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, this time involving the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause. Indeed, in both of those 2009 cases, Justices Scalia and Thomas joined Justices Stevens, Souter, and Ginsburg (then also the most “liberal” justices).

What happens in such cases is that the most originalist justices, those who like clear bright-line rules rather than mushy standards or balancing tests, join with justices who bend over backward to grant relief to criminal defendants, against those with law-and-order (Alito) or technocratic (Breyer) or establishmentarian (Roberts, Kennedy) tendencies. Granted, Justice Thomas has been less consistent in that sense this term, but that’s the dynamic to consider when looking at seemingly weird splits in criminal procedure cases.

Given all the attention that the Federal Reserve has garnered for its monetary “stimulus” programs, it’s perplexing to many that the U.S. has been mired in a credit crunch. After all, conventional wisdom tells us that the Fed’s policies, which have lowered interest rates to almost zero, should have stimulated the creation of credit. This has not been the case, and I’m not surprised.

As it turns out, the Fed’s “stimulus” policies are actually exacerbating the credit crunch. Since credit is a source of working capital for businesses, a credit crunch acts like a supply constraint on the economy. This has been the case particularly for smaller firms in the U.S. economy, known as small and medium enterprises (“SMEs”).

To understand the problem, we must delve into the plumbing of the financial system, specifically the loan markets. Retail bank lending involves making risky forward commitments, such as extending a line of credit to a corporate client, for example. The willingness of a bank to make such forward commitments depends, to a large extent, on a well-functioning interbank market – a market operating with positive interest rates and without counterparty risks.

With the availability of such a market, banks can lend to their clients with confidence because they can cover their commitments by bidding for funds in the wholesale interbank market.

At present, however, the interbank lending market is not functioning as it should. Indeed, one of the major problems facing the interbank market is the so-called zero-interest-rate trap. In a world in which the risk-free Fed funds rate is close to zero, there is virtually no yield be found on the interbank market.

In consequence, banks with excess reserves are reluctant to part with them for virtually no yield in the interbank market. As a result, thanks to the Fed’s zero-interest-rate policies, the interbank market has dried up (see the accompanying chart).

Without the security provided by a reliable interbank lending market, banks have been unwilling to scale up or even retain their forward loan commitments. This was verified in a recent article in Central Banking Journal by Stanford Economist Prof. Ronald McKinnon – appropriately titled “Fed ‘stimulus’ chokes indirect finance to SMEs.” The result, as Prof. McKinnon puts it, has been “constipation in domestic financial intermediation” – in other words, a credit crunch.

When banks put the brakes on lending, it is small and medium enterprises that are the hardest hit. Whereas large corporate firms can raise funds directly from the market, SMEs are often primarily reliant on bank lending for working capital. The current drought in the interbank market, and associated credit crunch, has thus left many SMEs without a consistent source of funding.

As it turns out, these “small” businesses make up a big chunk of the U.S. economy – 49.2% of private sector employment and 46% of private-sector GDP. Indeed, the untold story is that the zero-interest-rate trap has left SMEs in a financial straightjacket.

In short, the Fed’s zero interest-rate policy has exacerbated a credit crunch that has been holding back the economy. The only way out of this trap is for the Fed to abandon the conventional wisdom that zero-interest-rates stimulate the creation of credit. Suppose the Fed were to raise the Fed funds rate to, say, two percent. This would loosen the screws on interbank lending, and credit would begin to flow more readily to small and medium enterprises.

During the House Agriculture Committee’s debate over a new farm bill, Tennessee Republican Stephen Fincher cited 2 Thessalonians 3:10 in defending relatively small cuts in food stamps after Rep. Juan Vargas’s (D‑CA) cited Jesus’s call to feed the hungry: 

“For also, when we were with you, this we declared to you: that, if any man will not work, neither let him eat.” 

The federal government uses force and the threat of violence to obtain the money that is used to pay for food stamps, so I would argue that Rep. Vargas badly misunderstands what the Prince of Peace was getting at. But whereas Vargas was wrong, Rep. Fincher’s biblical counterpunch was breathtakingly hypocritical. As it turns out, Fincher has likely received millions of dollars in federal farm subsidy payments over the years. 

From the New York Times: 

Using Agriculture Department data, researchers at the Environmental Working Group found that Representative Stephen Fincher, a Republican and a farmer from Frog Jump, Tenn., collected nearly $3.5 million in subsidies from 1999 to 2012. The data is part of the research group’s online farm subsidy database, from which the group issues a report each year. 

In 2012 alone, the data shows, Mr. Fincher received about $70,000 in direct payments, money that is given to farmers and farmland owners, even if they do not grow crops. It is unclear how much Mr. Fincher received in crop insurance subsidies because the names of people receiving the subsidies are not public. The group said most of the agriculture subsidies go to the largest, most profitable farm operations in the country. These farmers have received $265 billion in direct payments and farm insurance subsidies since 1995, federal records show. 

During debate on the farm bill in the House Agriculture Committee last week, Mr. Fincher was one of the biggest proponents of $20 billion in cuts to food stamps in the legislation. At times he quoted passages from the Bible in defending the cuts. 

“We have to remember there is not a big printing press in Washington that continually prints money over and over,” Mr. Fincher said during the debate. “This is other people’s money that Washington is appropriating and spending.”

Yes, Rep. Fincher – and it’s other people’s money that’s been going into your back pocket. As another recent quote from Fincher indicates, the congressman either doesn’t recognize his hypocrisy or he doesn’t care. (I can’t decide which is worse.) 

From the International Business Times: 

“But more than that, the role of citizens, of Christians, of humanity, is to take care of each other,” Fincher said at a Memphis event last week. “But not for Washington to steal money from those in the country and give it to others in the country. Our role is out of control.”

Stunning. 

Rep. Fincher’s inability or unwillingness to remove the plank in his own eye is yet another example of how Republicans are generally lousy at making the case for spending cuts. They mock President Obama’s stimulus job creation claims, but turn around and argue that military spending cuts will kill jobs and hurt the economy. They complain about Solyndra and the White House’s crony capitalist schemes, but they work to secure the same handouts for companies back in the district. They rant against big government but continue to vote for it. Etc, etc. 

Both food stamps and farm subsidies should be cut, and preferably, eliminated. Unfortunately, there are too few members of Congress who are willing and able to make the case.